Understanding Digital Racism

This book explores the ecology of digital racism. It offers an innovative contemporary approach for understanding how people manifest racism and transform it through digital technologies.

It starts by highlighting the proliferation of technologically mediated racisms, and the shortcomings
of existing accounts. Digital racism takes many forms, such as: viral memes circulating via social media platforms; the swarming of online users targeting a person of colour; the hidden bias of algorithmic sorting, or; the licentious racial profiling of policing and surveillance systems. The variance and complexity of technologically mediated racisms begs the question whether adequate attention has been paid to digital processes and environments through which race materializes (spoiler: it hasn't). Existing accounts see it as an extant 'real-world' phenomenon iniquitously amplified by digital media and communications; or in technodeterminist terms which attribute contemporary technologies as the generator of 'virtual' racisms.

The book presents an analysis of digital racism by acknowledging the mutual entanglement of racism and digital technologies. It is influenced by a media ecology perspective which studies the complexity, interactivity and materiality of digital systems. This book elaborates the sociotechnical production of racism. It draws on 'assemblage theory' where digital race/racism is conceived as an emergent force constituted through the interactions of social and technical phenomena. That is, how digital assemblages – networked relations, communication platforms, interfaces, software processes, human interactions etc. – are constitutive of post-racial formations. Analyzing the conditions of digital post-raciality captures contemporary transformations of racism. Arguably, racism not only operates as a disciplinary mode of power, maintaining purity and excluding others. In a post-colonial age of technological globalization, deterritorialization, mobility and connectivity, a biopolitical racism attempts to manage difference. Overall, this book explores race/racism as informational and immaterial through interrogating its digital conditions of emergence, propagation and mutation. An analysis of networked relations, information flows, subjectivation and affects are critical to understanding contemporary productions of digital racism.

In Understanding Digital Racism, Sanjay Sharma has composed a terrifically insightful analysis of the extensions and transformations in racism as a result of digital technology. Sharma focuses on how its driving architecture—networks, algorithms, and scale—embeds, reproduces, but also "charges" new expressions of racist culture and a postracial techno-sociality of control. A book, as a result, that importantly advances understanding of the framing and shaping of contemporary technologies of racism, in turn informing research, teaching, and activism.

-- David Theo Goldberg, distinguished professor of anthropology, University of California, Irvine

Understanding Digital Racism uniquely examines the emergence, propagation, and mutation of digital racism, delving into the racial logics of contemporary digital culture. This remarkable book provides a nuanced understanding of digital racism, while simultaneously offering interdisciplinary insights into combating this pervasive socio-technical phenomena. Sharma’s approach is theoretically rich through his conception of digital racism as “assemblages,” but also fearless in unpacking real-world implications. This is a must-read for scholars and researchers seeking to confront the complexities of contemporary digital racism.

-- Dhiraj Murthy, professor of media studies, sociology, and information, University of Texas at Austin

Sanjay Sharma is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London. He is widely published in the areas of digital media, race and representation.

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